


A Magic World

by gloss



Category: Arts & Sciences RPF
Genre: F/F, Revolution, Utopia, dreamworlds and catastrophes, political violence, radical feminism, scum, warhol's factory, weather underground
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:57:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world" (SCUM Manifesto)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Magic World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emei/gifts).



> Mention of sexual and physical abuse as well as political/politicized violence.

## "Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it." [1]

It's 1951 and she is fifteen and the world trembles around her. She's going to be a poet. She's going to take all the words that roil beneath her skin and crowd her mind and she's going to yank them out, handkerchiefs from a sleeve, sword from a throat, into the world, to change the world.

Valerie is in love. With the world, with girls, with her own soft skin and tight smile and fall of her hair against her neck. With Betty Ann DiNardi, with Rebecca Schulmann, with Tamara Jenks, with Marie-Therese LaChance, with girls she hasn't met yet, girls who haven't been born. All of them, rounded shoulders and flared hips, curious and shy, brash and vulgar.

She lifted five dollars from her grandfather's billfold and asked Dorothy Czolgosz to the Steel Pier amusement park.

Dorothy has seven freckles across her nose, three on the left, two on the right, and two stacked right on top of each other down the bridge. They disappeared, the skin wrinkling up, as she said, "Eww. _Val_ erie, what is wrong with you?"

She didn't say that, of course, until Valerie had already bought her a strawberry pop and cone of candy floss and tried four times at the Duck Hunt booth to win her a blue stuffed puppy dog.

So when Dorothy does push Valerie away, one little white hand on Valerie's shoulder, and says, again, "Ewwww", her mouth is sticky with candy, bright red, a few hairs caught in it.

Valerie tries to kiss her again. Goes forward on tiptoe in her scuffed brown loafers and puckers right up; Dorothy shoves her, again, harder, sends her sprawling.

Valerie can still taste strawberry-sugar and the tang of blood where she bit her lip. She runs, and runs, fists clenched and arms pumping, for the Ferris Wheel.

At the top, she can see all of Atlantic City, all the sea, its waves gray and white, crimped like a rich girl's hair on Sunday morning, ruched-up, crawling and dragging for shore.

To the south, a bloom of new jellyfish, countless, clots the water. No one knows where they come from, how they get here. They just appear and swarm.

She's been bit by one more than once, sharp, searing pain around her leg, impossible to shake off.

She doesn't have words for this feeling. No one has words for this. She tastes salt air on her tongue, and blood and candy. Her eyes burn dry. If she jumped, from here, she'd fly. No one would ever miss her.

The loss she feels is as sudden and sharp as the guillotine's drop. She knows she is homesick for something she never had, somewhere she has yet to visit. Dorothy's kiss, or a swan dive, or some place between the two.

 

## "But SCUM is too impatient to wait for the de-brainwashing of millions of assholes. Why should the swinging females continue to plod dismally along with the dull male ones? Why should the fates of the groovy and the creepy be intertwined?" [2]

She's a little over thirty now, and she's got stretch marks on her belly and scars on her wrists and arms to match the ones on her back from Grampa. She's haggard, just like her mother got, all the more the pig-face her father used to call her. She's ugly, small, greasy and dark, and the world makes sure to let her know that.

("You dyke! You're disgusting!": And that's how she met Warhol, when he fed Viva lines to say like a reverse Cyrano, cruel and mocking. "Dyke!")

She isn't a poet, not yet.

That is, she is a poet. She has always been a poet, but no one will know she is until they read her words. Until she gets published.

Until someone pays.

She hocked her typewriter last week. It was the only way to pay for another two weeks in the SRO hotel on the west side, right at the Hudson. She could have turned some tricks, but that thought, just now, is unbearable. Besides, she doesn't have the time.

She's writing with stubs of pencil and pens stolen from cashier counters and, once, shamefacedly, from a blind man. She writes on the cardboard sheets discarded behind the dry-cleaner's on the corner, on the flyleaves of waterlogged books, everywhere she can.

Men have money, women have sex. Men pay, women create, and she can't stop writing.

But she needs money. She needs to eat, she needs somewhere to sleep.

So she's here at this party and it's worse than any stroll she ever took looking for a john. At least on the street, you know what he's looking for. There, she could turn off her brain and just do the work -- jack him hard and fast as a piston, suck with plenty of spit and fake grunts -- but here she has to _try_. She has to get their money.

The party is as enervated, drained of affect and engagement, as any she has ever attended here at the Factory. Everyone stands around, fearful of getting involved, because passion would give the lie to their self-conscious cool. Andy talks and waves his hands like a drunk Chopin and everyone thinks to themselves that they're the prettiest.

"You ever notice that?" Valerie asks. Ultra leans against a column wrapped in peeling tin foil, her arms wrapped around her. Ultra is always cold. She's too thin, a bag of broken bones.

"Hmm?" Ultra blinks slow, like a lizard, like any streetcorner dope fiend.

"Only good-looking broads allowed in here," Valerie says.

It's true. The Factory's the home of the eccentric and the free-spirited, but if you're a chick, you damn well better be easy on the eye. Even if none of the men want to bone you, from Andy on down, your beauty is a prerequisite.

Your value is your face.

Ultra's bored. Her eyes roll away from Valerie and she sighs.

"C'mon, you must've noticed," Valerie insists. She doesn't know why she does this, why she keeps trying, why she wants attention from some bony-assed Daddy's Girl. She's no better than any stupid man, dancing on her back-legs, begging for scraps.

Finally, Ultra looks back at her. Valerie hates the trill of heat that plays down her spine when their eyes meet.

"There's you," Ultra says. Her lipstick is bitten off in the corner; her mascara's clotted and heavy over her clear, beautiful eyes. "But I guess you don't count."

*

Valerie doesn't count. Girodias has her contract, Warhol has her script and all her connections, and she's got nothing. Every day, she's got a little less than nothing, a little more pain in the headache, a little more swelling around her bad tooth, a little more rumbling-hollow hunger in the pit of her sour stomach.

All she wants is to get free of them. That's for her. That's the trivial, psychologized goal: feed, sleep, free.

From there, the challenge is to see the patterns at large, in the world's structures. She has to move away from the single mind's psychology to the society's widespread neurosis.

Is it too much to want a little tenderness, too? Just a nice, warmhearted lady sometimes, who smells good and scoots over, makes room in the warmed-up bed, kisses her like a promise and reward both.

*

She has tried, she really has, to see the distinction, but there's no difference between Warhol and his friends and any other group of social elites. The women have to be beautiful (and Warhol prefers them damaged, fragile, easily bruised, chipped-porcelain) and defer to the men. The men jockey for position, play oneupmanship and dick-measuring in conversation. Everyone drinks too much and thinks too highly of themselves. Then they go home, sleep it off, and do it all over again the next day.

She would be better off anywhere else.

She can't stay away. She hates this. She keeps coming back, in case Andy remembered to read her script, in case Ultra remembers her name this time, in case, in case, in case.

Ultra blinks theatrically. "Andy's an artist!"

"Nah." Valerie flicks the ash off her cigarette. "He's no artist."

They're in the last booth at the very back of the Greek diner across Union Square. Ultra has a black coffee and plate of beef stew in front of her, untouched. Valerie can't afford much more than the coffee she's gripping in one hand.

Ultra has a cold. Her nose is red and shiny, her voice scratchy as an old LP. She's swimming in someone else's cabled sweater; she can't stop picking at the pills of wool, _pluck, pluck_. Her hair's messy. Not _consciously_ so, the way it usually is, artfully tousled, but actually messy. A little greasy, matted down in the back, curling the wrong way.

"You're just being obnoxious. Jealous."

Valerie draws herself up in her seat. "I'm not fucking jealous of that limpdick--"

Inhaling on her freshly-lit cigarette Ultra coughs, hard enough that her shoulders draw up around her ears and the cigarette dangles dangerously from her hand. Valerie snatches it away and shakes Ultra by the bony shoulder.

"For Christ's sake, you're sick, don't make it worse."

Ultra looks at her through long lashes, her eyes wide and watery. Her eyeliner is old, smudged and flaking.

"You are being deliberately provocative," she says, her French accent thicker than when she's well (but not so thick as when she's drunk or strung out). "It is unbecoming on you."

Valerie doesn't know who to hate more. Herself, for coming around like this, for being unable to stay away, or Ultra for making her feel like this. "He's no better than any ad man. In fact, he's a little worse."

Ultra sneers at her. Valerie can either apologize or make it worse. She wants to apologize, she wants to take it all back, wants to curl up in Ultra's lap and get her hair stroked and have it all _go away_.

"Ads tell you what you already know." She stabs the cigarette _this_ close to Ultra's mouth. "Art's supposed to show you something else. Something you couldn't believe is possible.

"Andy makes ads that sell at art prices. It's obscene."

It's more obscene than anything Valerie's ever done or dreamed.

Ultra stands up suddenly, then pauses, unsteady on high heels. She tosses a mangy fur around her throat and stalks away. Her heels are Tommy-gun fire on the old linoleum floor.

Valerie grinds out her cigarette in the stew. She's paying for it, it seems. She can do what she wants with it.

 

## "Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks." [3]

Most of the time, Valerie is a visitor in this world. She understands all too well how it works, what makes it tick, who its people are, but she has little, if any, connection to any of those things. She is alone here. Everyone else belongs here; she does not.

Being an alien means that she *can* understand this world, but no more. And none of its residents seem to share her perception.

Her degree in clinical bullshit would argue that this is the very definition of mental illness: she sees what no one else sees.

She should make this into art.

She should, but hell if she knows how to dramatize this. How do you show every moment of every day what it is to be an alien, unwanted and loathed, in the world? Doors that are held open for everyone else are shut in your face. People elbow you aside on the street, exactly as if she's a piece of garbage twisting in the wind. Though you hold the ticket with the number just called, the counter-man serves the pretty, white middle-class woman beside you. Men don't see you except to fuck you, and then they have their eyes closed so they can picture Jayne Mansfield or Mommy or whoever.

Not that you want or need them to fuck you. But the people you want to get close to, smell their hair and hear their fears, they cringe at your approach, wince at your very existence.

That truth cannot be dramatized. It's simply, horribly, lived, every day. A gnawing hunger and persistent dread accompany you and all you can do is keep drawing breath. Stay mad and don't give in.

Beyond art, supporting it, giving it structure, is the truth. Valerie knows the truth better than her own name.

Names can change, like hair color. But truth is flesh, a gun, the passage to another world.

She shoots him three times, then four, before he lies still. Each bullet opens the door a little wider and pulls her closer to escape.

The world trembles as sheets of light wash over it.

Valerie reaches for Ultra; she doesn't want to go alone.

Everyone is crying and screaming now, snot running, alarms ringing. Ultra flinches from her. Valerie goes forward, chin up, gun empty, into a new world.

 

## "The ancients used to like to sing about natural beauty: snow and flowers, moon and wind, mists, mountains and rivers. Today we should write poems including iron and steel. And the poet also should know how to lead an attack." [4]

It's 1973. Tonight, Valerie appeared with some sisters at a consciousness-raising meeting out in Forest Hill, Queens. The usual dog and pony show, come glare at the revolution, suck on the vicarious thrill of radical chic.

Every little bit helps; you never know who might be listening.

The nice white ladies pressed their dimpled knees together even more firmly than they pursed their disapproving lips while Valerie, Naomi, and Hidaya spoke.

But they were fed, dinner and coffee and, get this, _ladyfingers_.

During the reception, Valerie steals off to wander the house. She lifts two silver charm bracelets and a set of ugly cufflinks from the master bedroom, two packs of cigarettes from the kitchen. She smokes half a joint with the daughter, home from college, outside on the postage-stamp back lawn. They make out sloppily, resin and smoke in their mouths, the girl's red nails pawing at Valerie's fatigues.

She has to use most of the evening's stipend on a livery cab home. Legal cabs won't go where she lives; the subways no longer run.

Blonde wig on her head, she takes a circuitous route three blocks south, then ducks into the corner bodega, through the back and down into the cellar. From there, moving faster, wig bouncing from her back pocket, she walks through one of the access tunnels. Clapping her hands to scare away the rats, then climbing hand-over-hand up the ladder.

She's not home yet. The People's Republic of Loisaida takes its security deadly seriously.

They know her, of course, but she still gets patted down at the perimeter entrance.

"Hey, take these. Give 'em to the anklebiters." She tosses the rest of the ladyfingers to Lois Bellardo, who's on sentry watch.

Lois's walkie crackles suddenly. Above them, the building starts to rattle and shake.

They don't waste time speaking. There's nothing to discuss. Lois gets a rifle off its hooks and tosses it to Valerie before they run up the stairs, all seven flights to the roof.

The government helicopters have been circling the blocks that make up the PRL for weeks now. Always just out of reach, their searchlights slicing across the streets and through the old tenements like scalpels, the machines hum and throb and leave you with grinding teeth and nausea.

Tonight, the campaign accelerates from harassment and surveillance to mortar shells and defoliants dropped on the rooftop food gardens.

Valerie loses Lois when they reach the roof. Gas and smoke boil through the air, make it palpable and nearly impenetrable. She drops to her knees, then lies down and crawls forward on her elbows, rifle cocked, until she hits the bank of garden containers.

Down in the street below, a kid is screaming. Horns shriek all over the city. Glass shatters and tinkles.

Someone grabs Valerie by the elbow and drags her close. As the smoke clears slightly, it reveals the sweaty, shining face of her lover Diana. She's grinning, teeth white in the night, as she reloads her assault rifle, slamming the cartridge in and winking at Valerie.

"Welcome back, honey," she shouts as she sights her target -- one helicopter dangling low, almost level with the roof, a cop hanging out the open side.

Diana pulls off the shot, the retort rolling her against Valerie. She smells like carbon and sweat; her short hair is plastered in loose curls off her face.

Valerie kisses her cheek and Diana tips her head into the touch. A fire across the street, down two buildings, lights the sky. Like a movie screen, far away and brighter than the sun, a dream. Diana wriggles closer. The down on her cheek is spangled with sweat, backlit like stars.

"How was your kaffeeklatsch?"

"Bullshit," Valerie replies and cocks her rifle when a second copter rises into sight. The world pounds under the rhythm of its rotor-blades. She breathes out and aims, just like Diana taught her, and hits the side three times before it veers away. "Your night?"

"Eh, bullshit, too." Diana says. She smiles and the curve of her lips is as round, as enthralling, as any breast or beautiful ass. (She's got both, to spare, and Valerie sure does appreciate them, never fear.) "Getting better."

Just like that, the helicopters depart. The silence left in their wake roars for several moments; Valerie has goosebumps, a chill, beneath her flopsweat. The fire dims, leaving afterglows behind their lids whenever anyone blinks.

*

The magic world grows, block by block, building by building, but most often apartment by apartment, room by tiny room.

The bloodiest battlefield isn't physical at all. It doesn't even have a name, the nexus where imagination and hope, belief and expectation, possibility and despair, all converge. This site, where what you believe is possible can be blown apart, rebuilt, reformed into an entirely different entity, this is where they fight.

The magic world interpenetrates our own. It moves through our world, with it, then against it, drifting like a jellyfish. Tentacles hang down, sweep through us, caress and tickle our minds as it moves.

On one side of its diaphanous skin, our world hunches, immobile and cruel. On the other, through the fluttering colors and twisting digits, anything is possible. Over there, worlds change and revolutions keep on blooming.

Valerie Solanas killed Andy Warhol.

Fred Hampton escaped the snitches and lynch-mob cops. Norma Jean Croy will never be charged, let alone serve any time.

The townhouse explosion propelled Diana Oughton into the stratosphere. Studded with nails, tumbling end on end, she cartwheeled into another New York.

This is a world where Maria Irene Fornes and, later, Paula Vogel and Migdalia Cruz will dominate Broadway; Neil Simon gets relegated to marginal, niche-interest playhouses that seat fewer than a hundred. Paley and Ozick, Rich and Giovanni and Chrystos top every most-read list (they cannot be bestsellers when knowledge is free), while Updike and Roth peddle their weird, grotesquely "special-interest" tales of middle-aged male impotence and trivial spiritual crises out of the trunk of their cars or as pamphlets on the subways.

John Lennon is, if not outright derided, at least widely disliked for distracting Ono from her music.

Assata Shakur unseats Bella Abzug in a hardfought mayoral campaign.

 

## "I wondered how you liked to spend those moments  
When freedom meant  
You knew  
They didn’t know." [5]

The sun is coming up, pink and orange light stealing through the smoke and rubble left by last night's raid. They got off easy, as it turns out: casualties were only an empty building and lots of smoke inhalation.

It's only going to get harder. The raid last night was a warning.

They both know that as they drag themselves home, hand in hand, Diana's tousled head on Valerie's shoulder. They strip off clothes filthy with sweat and gun oil, help each other stay upright while toeing off their shoes. The grime smudges their breasts and hips as they climb into the big tub that takes up the entirety of the front room of the two they share.

The water is barely warm. The sun climbs up over the steel-gray river.

Diana reclines against Valerie. Their fingers move, interlace, then part, under the water, make trails on skin, over aching muscles.

Two floors below, a record player is turned up high. Scratchy soul wanders upward, a throaty voice that twines into the dark room, knits them even closer together.

Valerie lets her eyes close and tightens her arms around Diana's ribcage. Savoring the slippery weight of Diana's breasts on her forearms, Valerie drifts into rest.

 

.

## sources

    1. Huey P. Newton, "[The Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements](http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/newtonq.html)". August 15, 1970.
    2. Valerie Solanas, "[The SCUM Manifesto](http://www.womynkind.org/scum.htm)". June, 1968.
    3. The Weather Underground, "[Declaration of a State of War](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_Declaration_of_a_State_of_War)", May 21, 1970.
    4. Ho Chi Minh, "On Reading 'Anthology of a Thousand Poets'", Prison Diary. 1942.
    5. "[For Assata Shakur](http://glenthrasher.blogspot.com/2006/11/sing-battle-song-revolutionary-poetry.html)", Sing a battle song: poems by women in the weather underground organizations. 1975.


End file.
